Same old, same old straw men, platitudes, and ode to big government and collectivism:

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

I didn’t watch because I’ve seen that movie before.

Krauthammer did watch, and he summed it up as an ode to big government (who coulda guessed that?) via Mediaite:

Following President Obama’s second inaugural address, Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer called the speech an “amazing” one which rebuked the limited government beliefs of the Reagan era and served as the president’s “ode to big government.”

“I thought it was an amazing speech, and historically very important,” Krauthammer began. “This this was really Obama unbound. And I think what’s most interesting is that Obama basically is declaring the end of Reaganism in this speech.”

Obama initially detested Reagan, then appeared to embrace and admire the ‘transformational’ aspects of the Reagan presidency. What Obama likes was the creation of Reagan Democrats, Reagan’s ability to pull centrist Democrat voters to his side.

Obama’s top advisors have signaled Obama’s primary goal for the next two years is to create a civil war within the GOP, prepatory to taking back the House in 2014. He’ll be trying to copy Reagan by splitting Republicans to create the mirror of what Reagan did – instead of Reagan Democrats, he seeks to create Obama Republicans. Obama seeks to divide the conservative GOP wing from the centrist GOP wing with political jihad on the social issues, with a goal to turn RINOs into Obama Republicans. The current push on gun control is one theater in this jihad. The effort is struggling, I believe, because the Obama team hadn’t planned to start it this soon, but couldn’t pass up an opportunity to exploit a catastrophe tailor made for them: the New Town shootings.

Guns and Bibles, perceived holy icons of the ‘bitter clingers’ in the eyes of Obamans. The anti-gun jihad is currently underway, the end result not yet clear. Since the Obamacare contraceptive mandates haven’t provoked the GOP-splitting civil war hoped for, look for a new policy intiative from Obama that tries to hit the seam between the religious right and the not-so-religious centrist GOPers, those willing to cave on issues of religious freedoms, in a way similar to how they cave on issues of fiscal conservatism.

I do not believe Obama knows better than Bibi Netanyahu what is best for Israel, but I do think he knows better than the current GOP leadership what is best for the GOP. Obama seeks to politically alienate and marginalize the conservative wing of the GOP – the wing that provided the windfall landslides in 2010 – knowing that the surviving centrist GOP is toothless and without any apparent will to fight.

1. A quick read gave me much to disagree with, but the speech didn’t seem deranged. In contrast, at the time the Bush “Islamist Spring” Second Inaugural Address struck me as flat-out nuts.

2. Those who think Reaganism is dead shouldn’t glare at Obama. They should glare at, foremost among others, the Bush family.

3. I am not convinced that Reaganism is dead. Given this country’s capacity for reinventing itself, Reaganism may well resume in a form adapted to the new century. As Reagan put it in his farewell address, the point wasn’t whether he was a great communicator; the point was that he communicated great things.

re 2: The George W. Bush presidency. I agree. (I don’t know enough specifics about the senior Bush’s term but what I know isn’t good.) “Compassionate conservatism” = more dough and power for big government.

3. Me too.

re: 1. Not deranged, and I take you as purposefully provocative / i.e. saying what you think at that writing — which I enjoy. Obama’s not nuts; I think his exponential extension of “man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others”* might have tragic consequences. if unchecked.

I like what you write. I think you are working on higher abstractions — testing ideas re: what’s going on for real … why is our country going in this direction … how to change it. What will work.

You’re generous, but I am quite aware of my limitations as an abstract thinker. I do try to focus on the (mis?)match between ideas and rhetoric, and a reality that is not a morality play. Thank you for crediting that.

I urgently believe that the conservative movement is inadequately self-critical, especially since the election. Hopefully my comments, irritants to some, are written primarily in the service of that conviction: afaic it can be tempting to be provocative for provocation’s sake, but at some point it becomes sophomoric.

Maybe a survey of history — including the defeat of totalitarian regimes — would be helpful?

Many tactics used by progressives are not available to honest players. This I see as a real problem. Tactics ranging from massive constituent-buying welfare programs to specific voter registration fraud.

Add to that — the republican politicians acting in their own interest and without constitutional principle.

So how to defeat the one party and reform the other.

And the huge situation — that so many Americans can’t conceive of or don’t care about the consequences from the course the country is on.

Reading recommendations welcome. I’ll try to find a selection that would include Walker in Wisconsin and Daniels in Indiana — how they did what they did.

Obama: “They [safety-net programs] do not make us a nation of takers. They free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

Atlas is shrugging. A new freedom is born: the Freedom from Risk. It appears to be closely related to the Freedom from Consequences and the ever popular Freedom to Sit-on-Your-Backside-and-Let-Others-Do-the-Heavy-Lifting.

Obama: “Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”

Oh, yes, “cared for and cherished and always safe” by the benevolent State. I can see the New Living Constitution now:

We, the Sheeple of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Social Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the Common Defence of the State, promote lots and lots of general Welfare, and secure the Blessings provided by the State to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this New Order for the United States of America.

Also, there is no other means to regulate intercourse between or among other sovereigns than laying a tax on that intercourse unless you plan to use the military to impose your internal regulations over commercial activities within them.

So I can count on you for major bankruptcy reform, then? An end to the corporate form? Freedom from risk is central to the American economy; don’t forget it.

This was NOT, nor it was EVER, intended as a “celebration of America”. This was all about rubbing it in the faces of fly-over country, Middle America, the “bitter clingers”. This was not about “Uniting America”: it was about drawing the battle lines.

Why doesn’t anyone recognize this? Why doesn’t anyone walk away from this farce and shout it to the world?

collectivism, any of several types of social organization in which the individual is seen as being subordinate to a social collectivity such as a state, a nation, a race, or a social class. Collectivism may be contrasted with individualism, in which the rights and interests of the individual are emphasized…

Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in such movements as socialism, communism, and fascism…

The common characteristic of collectivism, as expressed in Communism, Fascism and Socialism, is that there is an elite, set apart from the rest of the equal schmucks. There is always a ruling class that figures it’s entitled (there’s that word, again) to being on top, because they knew what was best by making us all “equal” and will work to keep it that way. I mean, if you were walking and now have a Trabant courtesy of ‘they’, why begrudge your People’s Commissar his Mercedes?

The unending Fascist pep rallies drone on & on. The steel doors to the Assembly rooms are welded shut. The bars are up on the windows. The Fascists abide no disrespect, no objection, no escape from Dear Leaders pervasive aura. Their objective as expressed by Ken Salazar is their boot in your face so you know whose Boss. . . An aside. Tom Brokaw & NBC in particular noticeably soiled themselves I’m their obsequious coverage of the historic nature of the occasion. I caught it in the 30 seconds it took between turning the TV on & traversing the room to the remote. Vomiting also occurred in the process.

Someone really needs to Fisk his speeches, especially this one, with a laugh track. Especially effective would be when he tells us to all stop being partisan, calling names and demonizing. I presume those things are his exclusive purview.

Anyway… his speeches, with laugh, track would go a long way towards that effective ridicule to which Mr. Alinsky alluded. Fight ‘em on their own terms with their own weapons.

In fact, I’m adding one thumbs up to every single commenter in this thread who was shouted down by the abundance of trolls and goblins going around the blogosphere today. (If you haven’t noticed, yet.)

A gay Latino poet led off,
Spoke be4 the 1st Dumbkoff.
Twas about Amerika & its folk,
Twas so bad I’d of taken a toke,
( That’s toke, not token, folk)
Or get as drunk as Hasselhoff!

Nary a ryme to be found by this Muse,
his purpose was not to confuse,
but with platitude cover,
empty headed cliches that hover,
from lips of dear leader unbound,
to ear of empty headed audience redound.

Does that sick joke of a president imagine that people never join their efforts with others to accomplish a goal unless they are directed to do so by the government? Does he imagine that he’s the first person to think, “Hey, a lot of things can’t be done by one person alone; I’ll get people to work together”?

Maybe so. He’s the same moron who looks at the system/philosophy that’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other in history, and that quickly turned the United States from a colonial backwater into a superpower, and he says, “It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.”

[...] memorable; there’s not a line here that [will or would] ever be repeated.” (Hat tip to Legal Insurrection.) President Obama seems to see speech material like wall-to-wall carpet, with each square foot as [...]

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